Summer means something different depending on where you spend it. In Chicago, it is the season residents wait for through a long winter: the months when the lakefront fills up, the windows stay open, and the parts of a building that went quiet in the cold come back into daily use. In Scottsdale, summer is the season to work around. The heat sets the schedule, and life shifts toward the cooler hours at either end of the day, with the middle reserved for shade and the indoors.

Optima designs, builds, and operates its communities, so the way each one meets its season is deliberate rather than incidental. The planted terraces, the integration of indoor and outdoor space, and the amenity floors set throughout the building are all drawn for the climate they sit in.

Summer in Chicago

In Chicago and the North Shore, summer is when the outdoor spaces do most of the work. The flowers bloom, the sky decks open, and the rooftop that felt exposed in January becomes the most used space in the building. Evenings stretch late, so residents drift outside after work: dinner on a terrace, a swim before the sun goes down, an easy walk to the water. The floor-to-ceiling glass that keeps the interiors bright all year now opens onto a season that rewards being outside.

Summer in Scottsdale

In Scottsdale, the rhythm runs the other way. The hottest stretch of the year pulls activity indoors and toward the edges of the day. Mornings begin early, before the heat sets in, which is when the pools and the shaded paths get used. By midday the interior amenities take over: the fitness centers, the lap pools, and the cooled lounges. The architecture does steady, quiet work through all of it. The vertical landscaping that wraps the buildings and the deep terraces keep direct sun off the glass, so the interiors stay comfortable without leaning as hard on the cooling system. Life moves back outdoors in the evening, once the heat lifts.

Built for the place

What the two regions share is an approach. Each Optima community is conceived as a complete environment rather than a building with amenities attached, and that environment is tuned into where it stands. In Chicago that means spaces that open outward and make the most of a short season. In Scottsdale it means spaces that hold their comfort through a long summer. The same design thinking sits behind both, carried from the drawing through to the way the building is run.

Explore our communities across Chicago and Scottsdale to see how this approach carries from one place to the next.

There’s a particular kind of friction that makes fitness routines hard to sustain: the getting-there part. When the gym requires a separate membership, a commute, and a fixed class time that doesn’t bend to the rest of life, the routine becomes harder to keep. One busy week is often enough to break it.

At Optima, the fitness center sits within the same building as the home, and that proximity changes how people actually use it.

Proximity as the Missing Variable

Most conversations about fitness habits focus on motivation or the right workout plan. But the simpler factor that tends to matter more is the distance. The closer a habit is to where you already are, the more likely you are to repeat it. When the fitness center is a short elevator ride away, accessible early in the morning or late at night, it stops being an event you schedule and becomes a part of your day.

This is the logic behind how Optima designs fitness amenities across its communities in Illinois and Arizona. The centers are built to be genuinely complete, not a few treadmills in an afterthought of a room, so that residents can work through a full range of training goals without needing anything else. Cardio equipment, free weights, strength training, dedicated yoga space, and often Pilates studios occupy the same connected floor, making it easy to shift between kinds of movement depending on the day.

Built for the Full Range of Fitness Goals

At Optima Signature in Streeterville, the fitness center is paired with a yoga studio, an indoor lap pool, an indoor and outdoor saunas, steam rooms, and a cold plunge. Personal training, yoga, and Pilates classes are available through an on-site partnership, and a Reform Studios Pilates location just steps outside the building adds reformer work as well.

Optima Lakeview brings that same range to the Lakeview neighborhood. The fitness center overlooks the building’s sky-lit atrium and includes cardio and strength equipment, free weights, squat racks, and a dedicated yoga and stretching studio. Complimentary towel service, weekly classes, and personal training are available, and the year-round heated rooftop pool is there for residents whose routines include swimming.

Optima Verdana in Wilmette pairs a fully equipped fitness center with a yoga studio and massage room. Fitness programming includes yoga, HIIT, Pilates, water aerobics, and personal training, so residents have organized options alongside the freedom to use the space on their own schedule.

The Scottsdale Communities

In Scottsdale, the fitness amenities reflect the scale of the buildings. At Optima Kierland Apartments, each of the towers has its own dedicated fitness spaces. The 7160 tower features a 16,000-square-foot fitness center with locker rooms, a steam room, sauna, hot and cold plunges and a massage room. Tower 7140 offers roughly 27,000 square feet of wellness amenities including indoor and outdoor fitness areas, a rooftop yoga studio, and a rooftop running track. Tower 7190 continues that with an indoor/outdoor fitness center, free weights, stretching areas, and an outdoor pickleball court and golf area. On-site massage therapy, fitness classes, and personal training are available across all towers.

At Optima Sonoran Village, the 24-hour fitness center includes treadmills, bikes, stair climbers, free weights, and Life Fitness Signature Series strength equipment alongside a basketball court and golf simulator. The glass-enclosed center looks out over the indoor lap pool, keeping the transition between training and recovery easy. Saunas, steam rooms, and a spa complete the offering.

At Optima McDowell Mountain, the fitness center includes indoor and outdoor training areas, Pilates and yoga studios, locker rooms, and spa-adjacent spaces with a sauna, hot and cold plunges and a massage room, all looking out over the landscaped courtyard.

Recovery as Part of the Routine

Steam rooms, saunas, hot and cold plunges, and spa services appear across Optima communities because recovery is treated as part of the routine. Being able to move from a workout directly into a sauna or steam room, and then back upstairs, makes it easier to keep that part of the routine intact when time is limited. Massage booking through the buildings resident services app and partner programs extends this further, without requiring a separate appointment somewhere else.

A Low-Friction Environment

What Optima’s fitness amenities offer, more than any particular piece of equipment or programming, is a low-friction environment for showing up regularly. There’s no car to park, no membership card for another place, no commute in weather that doesn’t cooperate. There’s just the elevator, a pair of shoes, and whatever the day calls for.

Explore Optima’s communities across Illinois and Arizona and schedule a tour to see the amenities firsthand.

The first months in an Optima community are about discovery, finding the best chair in the lounge, learning the rhythm of the pool deck, figuring out which elevator is fastest in the morning. But residents who have been here for years carry something different, a quieter familiarity with the building and the people inside it that turns an apartment into a home and a community into something closer to a small neighborhood with its own habits and its own sense of place.

The building becomes intuitive

Over time the building becomes second nature. Longtime residents move through it with an ease that comes from repetition, knowing which lounge is quiet in the afternoon, which corner of the pool gets the best late light, which spot in the fitness center has the best view through the glass. The architecture that first impresses through its scale and clean lines slowly becomes more personal, a set of spaces that hold the small daily rituals of life in a way that feels both designed and entirely natural.

Relationships that build slowly

The more meaningful changes are about the people. Relationships at Optima tend to build slowly, through small repeated encounters at the coffee bar or the dog run or in the elevator, until the neighbors who were once polite strangers have become genuine friends. Community here does not arrive through any single event or introduction. It accumulates through shared daily life, where you see the same people at the same times in the same places until you find yourself genuinely curious about how their week is going. There are residents who have watched each other’s children grow up across the hallway, residents who have moved within the building while staying in the community they consider home, and friendships that began with a lobby conversation neither person can quite remember the start of.

Knowing the rhythms

Staying for years also means understanding the rhythms of the place. There are weeks when the pool deck is busy in the morning and quiet by late afternoon, and seasons when the courtyards fill up or the fitness centers carry the most traffic. Longtime residents tend to know the quieter mid-week evenings worth claiming for themselves and the weekend mornings when everyone seems to gather around for coffee. This is the kind of knowledge that cannot be communicated in a tour, and it is one of the reasons residents stay as long as they do.

The staff who know you

Then there is the staff. The concierge who knows when your packages arrive, the maintenance team familiar with your apartment’s quirks, the management team who knows your name and your preferences. These relationships deepen across the years until the people running the building feel less like service providers and more like familiar faces who are part of the daily texture of home.

Art that grows with you

Living alongside the art changes with time too. The Kiwi sculpture at Optima Signature, the Curves and Voids sculpture at Optima Verdana, the Duo sculpture at Optima Kierland, the sculpture garden at Optima Sonoran Village, the atrium at Optima Lakeview, these are works that reward sustained attention. Longtime residents often notice things they had walked past for months, the way light falls on a Cor-Ten surface in the late afternoon, the way a sculpture reads differently in summer than in winter. The art is not meant to be experienced once. It lives alongside residents over years, becoming familiar in a way that opens up new attention rather than closing it off.

The deeper definition of home

What years in an Optima community look like, in the end, is a slow deepening of what the word home actually means. It is the difference between an apartment you occupy and a place you belong to, the steady accumulation of small familiarities, daily rituals that take shape without anyone planning them, and friendships built through proximity and repetition. Residents who have stayed long term tend to speak about their communities with the warmth of people who have made a real life inside a place rather than simply passing through it.

Explore our communities to find the one that fits the life you want to build.

Most people move into an Optima community expecting a beautiful home, but what they often do not expect is how quickly the building itself becomes a partner in their day. The package waiting at the door without a single text exchange, the trainer who already knows their name by the second visit, the pool that is somehow always the right temperature, and the events calendar that gives a Tuesday evening something to look forward to are not perks layered onto a residence but rather the residence itself, reshaping what daily life feels like in ways that are hard to anticipate before the move and impossible to imagine giving up afterward.

To understand the shift, it helps to look at what an ordinary day actually contained before, and what fills it after.

Before

The day used to begin with a small inventory of things that needed handling personally, from the gym membership across town to the dry cleaner who closed before you got home, the package that needed someone home to receive it, and the repair that required three phone calls to schedule and a vacation day to oversee. None of it was unmanageable, and that was almost the problem, because it was the steady arithmetic of running a home alone, and it quietly absorbed the hours that should have gone to other things.

Social life lived on the calendar, workouts lived on the calendar, and even relaxation, when it happened, tended to live on the calendar as well, fitted into the gaps between obligations. The home was a base of operations, and the operations never stopped.

After

The first thing that changes is who is in your corner, because Optima communities are run by on-site teams who treat the building as a hospitality experience rather than an address. The concierge knows the regulars, the maintenance team responds in hours rather than days with the kind of attention to detail that keeps a small problem small, and the package room handles the deliveries that used to organize a week around them. None of this is glamorous on a brochure, but all of it becomes transformative the first time it happens to you and quietly essential by the tenth.

The day then begins to rebuild around what is actually available within the building itself. The fitness center is downstairs, which means morning workouts stop competing with the commute, while heated pools turn swimming into a year-round practice rather than a seasonal hobby, and the saunas, steam rooms, and spa spaces give the body somewhere to recover that is not a separate appointment in a separate part of town. The work-from-home days have an actual office to retreat to, with conference rooms and quiet spaces designed for focus, so the kitchen table goes back to being a kitchen table.

The smaller conveniences are quieter and more constant in their effect, with dog wash rooms removing the chaos of a muddy afternoon, demonstration kitchens turning a dinner party into something you host rather than orchestrate, and outdoor lounges, fire pits, and rooftop terraces giving the warm evenings somewhere to go. Guest suites mean visiting family no longer requires giving up the couch, and curated events ranging from wellness classes to art tours to social gatherings fill the calendar with things the on-site team has already planned, so connection stops requiring effort to arrange.

The Building Knows You

This is the part that is hardest to convey before someone has lived it, because at Optima the staff is not a service tier but a relationship. The front desk team greets you by name, the wellness team remembers what you are training for, and the leasing and management teams know the rhythms of the building because they are in it every day, which translates into a level of care that is almost impossible to find in a residence of any other kind. A request rarely needs to be explained twice, a favor is often already done, and the building begins to feel less like a property and more like a place that knows you, which is a different and rarer thing entirely.

That sense of being known is what residents come back to when they describe the Optima difference. The fitness center, the pool, the lounges, and the terraces are all part of the picture, but the deeper truth is that life at Optima has been thoughtfully organized around what actually makes a day feel good, with ease, beauty, health, and connection in place of the small frictions that used to fill the hours between them.

What Residents Notice First

Sleep tends to improve within weeks, as the space is quieter, the light is better, and the body is moving more because moving has become easier than not moving. Social life expands as well, because the events are already on the schedule and the friends are often a few floors away, while the weekends open up because the maintenance that used to fill them is being handled by people whose work that is. The cooking gets better in kitchens that were made to be cooked in, and the work gets calmer in workspaces that were made to be worked in, and none of these shifts are individually dramatic, yet together they amount to a different life entirely.

What It Adds Up To

The before-and-after of moving into an Optima community is not really about square footage or finishes but about how much of a life gets spent on living, once the systems and people and spaces around you start doing their part. Residents come for the architecture, and they stay because the building, the team, and the daily experience of being there continue to give back long after the novelty of any single amenity has settled into routine.

Explore our communities and discover what the quiet promise of Optima feels like from the inside.

Ownership isn’t the only way to put down roots anymore, and for a growing number of residents, it isn’t the preferred way either. An Optima community offers something different, a way of living that feels complete on its own terms. The reasons are layered, but they share a common thread: residents are choosing freedom without compromising on quality, design, or community.

A Lifestyle Designed Around You

Optima has spent more than four decades refining what residential living can be. Each community is developed, designed, constructed, and managed in-house, which means every detail, from the architecture down to the resident events, reflects a singular vision. That vision spans two regions and six distinctive communities. In Chicago and the North Shore, residents find Optima Signature in Streeterville, Optima Lakeview in the heart of Lakeview East, and Optima Verdana in downtown Wilmette. In Scottsdale, Optima Sonoran Village anchors the Old Town neighborhood, while Optima Kierland and the newest community, Optima McDowell Mountain, define modern living in North Scottsdale. Across every location, design, service, and lifestyle are inseparable. For residents, the result is simple: homes that are well designed and easy to live in. Floor-to-ceiling windows, open floor plans, signature vertical landscaping, quality appliances, and thoughtful finishes are part of every home.

Amenities That Make a Home Feel Limitless

One of the clearest reasons residents choose to rent at Optima is what waits just beyond the front door. Resort-style amenities turn the building itself into an extension of home, and each community brings its own distinct character to the experience. At Optima Signature, the 57-story tower in Streeterville offers four full floors of amenities, including indoor and outdoor heated pools, a basketball court, and co-working suites, plus indoor access to Whole Foods. Optima Lakeview, a rooftop sky deck delivers panoramic city views alongside a heated pool and spa, BBQs, fire pits, and a glass-enclosed party room. At Optima Verdana on Chicago’s North Shore, lush vertical landscaping wraps a rooftop Sky Deck and residents’ club designed around a hospitality-infused quality of life. In Arizona, Optima Sonoran Village stretches across more than five acres of landscaped gardens, terraces, and courtyards, with two outdoor pools, a 19,000-square-foot fitness center, and indoor basketball and pickleball courts. Optima Kierland raises the bar with an Olympic-length rooftop pool, an outdoor pickleball arena, an indoor golf simulator, and a rooftop running track. And at Optima McDowell Mountain, the 8-story towers frames sweeping views of the McDowell Mountains, Pinnacle Peak, and Camelback, surrounded by world-class wellness amenities, rooftop sky decks, and an indoor/outdoor fitness center. At Optima, amenities aren’t an afterthought. They’re part of the original design, shaping communities where residents can swim, train, gather, host, and recharge without ever leaving home.

Service That Returns Your Time

The other side of renting at an Optima community is what residents don’t have to do. There are no roof repairs to schedule, no landscapers to manage, no appliances to replace. In their place is a layer of service designed to give time back: on-site maintenance, in-home package delivery, housekeeping, dry cleaning, grocery delivery, and a 24/7 concierge. It’s a model rooted in hospitality. Many residents describe the experience less like an apartment and more like living inside a private resort, one that happens to be in the heart of Chicago, the North Shore, Old Town Scottsdale or North Scottsdale.

Community Without Obligation

There’s also something to be said for the sense of community that forms inside an Optima property. On-site resident coordinators curate events, clubs, and gatherings, from book clubs and kid’s clubs to cocktail evenings on the sky deck, guided hikes, and cooking demonstrations, turning everyday encounters into real friendships. Residents can engage as much or as little as they like. The community is there when you want it, and your private residence is there when you don’t.

The Freedom Factor

Underneath all of this is the simplest and most powerful reason residents choose to rent: flexibility. The ability to move with a career, a season of life, or a change of scenery, between Streeterville, Lakeview, Wilmette, Old Town Scottsdale, Kierland, and North Scottsdale, without the friction that comes with owning a home.

A Different Definition of Home

Choosing to rent at Optima is choosing a life that’s been thoughtfully designed on every level: the building, the amenities, the service, the community, and the freedom to live the way you want to live. It’s not about renting instead of owning. It’s about living more, with less holding you back. That’s what makes Optima feel like home. Visit a community and experience the difference firsthand.